Last November, at PASS 2011, Ted Kummert, CVP, SQL Server laid out Microsoft’s data platform vision for the new world of data that we all live in – one that is characterized by an tremendous growth in the volume, variety and velocity of data that we need to deal with.

In his keynote, Ted pointed out that a key requirement of the data platform for the new world of data is that it must allow customers to seamlessly connect to the world’s data – whether it be social sentiment across multiple social networks, or stock performance data from across the world’s stock exchanges, or GDP data for developing countries. Customers need to have the ability to combine such external data with internal data coming from systems and applications they own, to answer new questions and drive new insights and actions.

A key capability needed to enable this vision is the support for application-agnostic open protocols to expose and consume data from diverse sources. Over the past three years, Microsoft has helped champion OData, a REST-based open data access protocol, via an open process on the public OData site (www.odata.org). Many components of Microsoft’s data platform, SQL Server 2012, SharePoint, Excel and Windows Azure Marketplace already support OData. During this time, OData has enjoyed rapid adoption externally as well, with a strong ecosystem of OData producers, consumers and libraries – many of them open source – including Java, PHP, Drupal, Joomla, Node.js, MySQL, iOS and Android. Other examples of ISV adoption include SAP NetWeaver Gateway technology that exposes SAP Business Suite software to clients on diverse platforms through OData and the IBM WebSphere eXtreme Scale REST data service, which also supports OData.

Based on the level of interest and scale of adoption of OData, we are happy to announce that Citrix, IBM, Microsoft, Progress Software, SAP and WSO2 are jointly submitting a proposal to standardize OData formally via OASIS, an international open standards consortium. This will enable a broader set of developers and interested parties to influence the development of the standard in a formal manner, as well as drive broader adoption of OData.

We encourage you to find more details of this announcement here and learn more about OData itself and how it can help you unlock data silos at http://www.odata.org.